The cover of this week’s New Yorker has already attracted plenty of criticism. The cartoon by Barry Blitt, which shows Barack and Michelle Obama standing in the Oval Office, with Barack wearing a turban, Michelle sporting an afro and carrying an AK-47, and a portrait of Osama bin Laden hanging over the mantelpiece, received a sharp slap from Barack Obama spokesman Bill Burton, who called it “tasteless and offensive.” John McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds agreed, echoing Burton’s exact terms.

Among Blitt’s fellow political cartoonists, however, the New Yorker cover has provoked more mixed reactions, with some calling it an acceptable piece of satire and others saying it crossed a line.

Ann Telnaes, a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist, defended the magazine cover against critics who say it is offensive.

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“There will always be someone offended somewhere,” she said, suggesting that the Obama campaign has responded too sensitively.

The cover, Telnaes wrote in an email, “was meant to be satirical and comment on the ludicrous rumors which have been going around the Internet and repeated endlessly on cable news.” According to Telnaes, the campaign operatives and pundits who have attacked the cartoon have been misreading the image.

Nick Anderson, who also won a Pulitzer for his cartooning and serves as president of the American Association of Editorial cartoonists, agreed with Telnaes that the cartoon was intended as satire. But he also had some sharp words for the New Yorker cartoonist.

“I think, as a piece of satire, it utterly fails,” Anderson told Politico. “The artist and the New Yorker editor [David Remnick] have claimed that it is so over the top that it is clearly absurd. But it’s not sufficiently over the top. It is merely depicting what the whisper campaigns have been suggesting.”

Anderson added that the cover might have been more effective if it had included the title of the cartoon, “The Politics of Fear,” on the front of the magazine.

“It would have been even stronger had they shown an enemy of Obama painting the picture, or imagining it in their head,” he said.

Stephen Hess, a scholar at the Brookings Institution who co-authored Drawn and Quartered: The History of American Political Cartoons, also said that it would have been helpful for readers to have the title of the cartoon as context.

But while Hess is no great fan of the New Yorker cover – in an interview with Politico, he called it “not particularly well-drawn or interesting” – he also thinks it has accomplished its goal by creating so much controversy.

The cartoon is “absolutely” offensive, Hess said. But he added: “That’s partly what makes it a good cartoon.”

“If it makes people argue and think about something, in our society that’s good. It does what a cartoon should do,” Hess continued. “Cartoonists should be equal-opportunity offenders.”

Remnick, the New Yorker editor, has said the cartoon “combines a number of fantastical images about the Obamas and shows them for the obvious distortions they are.”

“Satire is part of what we do,” Remnick said in a statement, “and it is meant to ring things out into the open, to hold a mirror up to prejudice, the hateful, and the absurd.”

But Anderson argued that cartoonists have the responsibility not just to be provocative, but also to be clear. He reiterated that this particular cartoon is not clear enough in its satire to be effective.

“There is a constant and natural tension in the creation of satire,” Anderson said. “The delicate art of satire is suffocated by heavy-handed elucidation. But, if the satirist fails to make the point clearly enough, the whole enterprise backfires in unintended misinterpretation.”